


Like Hoagie Carmichael

by beaubete



Category: The Hour
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-16
Updated: 2014-05-16
Packaged: 2018-01-25 09:26:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1643756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beaubete/pseuds/beaubete
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When she was younger, when Ruthie was little, she told her daddy that one day she’d marry a dark-haired, sloe-eyed man.</p><p>Canon character death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like Hoagie Carmichael

**Author's Note:**

  * For [beili](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beili/gifts).



> One thing that I discovered that I found rather funny is that Ben Whishaw looks a great deal more like Ian Fleming's description of James Bond than Daniel Craig does--not just in the dark hair and eyes, but in that Ben looks a fair amount like Hoagie Carmichael, a movie star and musician from the early 20th Century. While the name Hoagie Carmichael isn't very well-known these days, his work is--he's famous for his simple, popular songs on the piano, including almost all of the easiest ones beginners learn.
> 
> As a warning, this fic does include Ruth's death from her POV.

When she was younger, when Ruthie was little, she told her daddy that one day she’d marry a dark-haired, sloe-eyed man.  Well, to be perhaps a bit more honest, she’d said she was going to marry Hoagie Carmichael, and it isn’t until years later she sees the resemblance in Freddie--long-faced and solemn, with sad, serious expressions and faintly gaunt cheeks--and wonders at the fact her parents had ever let him board with them.  They’d had so much room rattling around in that old estate, just Mummy and Daddy and the three children, that Freddie’d had plenty of room to disappear into the dark woodwork and be forgot.  And when the war was over, he went back to London, which was part of the big, wide world and easily large enough to forget, himself.

She looks at Adam sometimes, and imagines.  He’s a beautiful man, she knows, and she’s always had a thing for brokenhearted men with bruised eyes.  She tries it exactly once, and his mocking, drunken laughter is enough; mortified, she snips back at him like a child, parades handsome men in front of him like Tantalus at the feast, though she always turns her head when the BBC man comes around.  Even she isn’t drunk or cruel enough to laugh at that, not when Professor Darrell--Peter--has gone and Thomas lingers, watching.  He’s another of her sloe-eyed men, dark and fixated and all too willing to play their third wheel until Peter’s secrets had revealed themselves.  Third and fourth, with his wife sometimes, and she wonders if things may have turned out differently if she hadn’t let herself get caught up in games of cloak and dagger.  She doesn’t let herself pretend that Peter would have given her the time of day is she weren’t the Honorable Miss Elms, raging in class about the ideals of a socialist society with her silver spoon tucked firmly between lips that still remembered stolen kisses from the dark-eyed boy her mummy had sent away for being poor.

Or.  Secrets, secrets, and secrets--Freddie’s mum had been her Daddy’s secretary, and Ruth’s not a child anymore; she understands what goes on behind a closed office door between a poor woman working for a paycheck and a Lord.  It doesn’t bother her to think that perhaps Mummy had sent him away because he looked like the man who’d sired him, that perhaps Freddie’d come by Christmases and holidays not for his own sake but for that of trysts in back offices and shadowed corners.  If it had meant Daddy could have a moment’s love, of happiness or even just lust, rutting on a desk in his office while Mummy’s lemon-pinched face had presided over party hats and her little brother sobbing his heart out into the cake sweetened with carrots instead of refined sugar, it doesn’t change her memory of an older boy letting her pull him down into a kiss, of his stiff frame bending to accommodate her strange new wants.

She sees him at the engagement party, at her debut into a society where poor boys are not welcome and he cannot follow even if he still wanted to, and the resemblance is even stronger, his dark hair long and sleekly combed, stern, solemn eyes on either side of his long nose and framed by dark, feathered lashes.  It’s almost enough to make her cry, looking at him, because she can still see it the way she’d always imagined in her girlhood: her beautiful, dark husband and his almost-nervous kisses, body long and tender and careful.  He’s small for a man--she’s small for a woman, and she’s still so sure they’d have fit together but for the gulf of ice between their bodies.  He’s polite, distant, dressed down one too many times for being familiar with his betters and though she knows he doesn’t care enough about class to defer because of it, he does it out of spite to see her wince and shrink back.  She doesn’t.  Shrink back.  There’s nowhere further for her to go.

And for a moment she thinks she could kiss him again, their mouths so close and that last laugh he guards so well in the corner of his mouth almost at the tip of her tongue, but Adam--and she can’t help flit her eyes at him, to tease, to say “This is what it looks like when a man sees you and finds you desirable” with a look--and Freddie backs away, runs from the things he’s been told he can’t have, but hasn’t he heard yet? that Ruth Elms will give it to anyone who asks?--even traitors, even men who will betray her nation, her country, her home--

“God, you’re drunk,” Adam slurs, and it’s the pot and kettle sharing a bottle of scotch between them in the back room.

But in their games, Freddie always was her dashing knight, never mind the way he’d wanted to play the unassuming pigherd who rose to greatness, and it’s instinct that brings her back to him with a request that can be fulfilled by no one else, that would be considered by no one with less than Freddie’s sharp, needling eyes and wounded mistrust of her family.  She doesn’t beg.  Not truly, not the way she knows he deserves after years of being told he wasn’t good enough, the way he deserves after being dragged out by the ear with Ruth’s childish pink lipstick still smeared on his face and humiliated terror writ in his eyes.  He tells her no, and honestly, she’s sure she deserves it.  That doesn’t make it hurt any less.

The day she--that day, everything feels wrong.  It feels off; Adam is out with one of his very close friends, rowing or swimming or perhaps just a long, languid fuck in the pool house with a pretty man, and all of her friends--the few she has left--are sick with jealousy at her successful debut, refusing phone calls with mysterious stomach ailments or headaches as if their petty refusals of company could punish her.  She doesn’t fault him taking pleasure where he can, remembers treating her own older friends the same way after their debuts when she was stranded to the children’s parties, and for everyone else, the day is perfectly normal.  She is alone with her thoughts and her fears, and when she calls Freddie, she’s surprised that he answers, surprised to hear that he’s followed up, surprised to hear in his voice how unworthy he still thinks he is; and she hates herself a little for that, hates her Mummy and her Daddy for the self-doubt as he talks about his own uselessness when he’s not.  He’s not; he’s the least useless person she’s ever known.

Thomas isn’t gentle.  He’s brisk, which she can appreciate, businesslike in a way that makes it clear that this isn’t personal, not at all, which does make her feel better, strangely--not at first, no.  Not when she’s scrabbling for the shower head, not when she’s standing on her tiptoes trying desperately for another inch, another ten minutes, another precious moment of life.  Not when she sees Freddie’s horrified face through the dark rings already circling the edges of her vision and her windpipe begins to close, but when he’s touching her with gentle, horrified hands, she imagines what he could have found instead and it makes her feel better, like drifting to sleep in a warm bath.

Ten years ago and miles away from a dark hotel room, two children sit close to each other with heads bowed light and dark, picking at the keys of a piano that gleams with polish.   _Heart and Soul--_

 


End file.
